About the Sketcher Palette

Sketcher provides you with a customizable library of predefined shapes that you can readily import into an active sketch. These shapes are presented in a palette. You can resize, translate, and rotate the shape when using it in an active sketch.

Using a shape from the palette is similar to importing the corresponding section in an active section. Each shape in the palette appears as a thumbnail with the name of the defining section file. These thumbnails appear with the default line style and color for the Sketcher geometry. User-defined line style and the color are ignored when generating the thumbnails.

You can use an existing section created in standalone Sketcher mode or a section created in Part or Assembly mode, to represent the user-defined shape.

The Sketcher palette has tabs representing categories of sections. Each tab has a unique name and contains at least one section of a certain category. There are four predefined tabs with predefined shapes:

You can add any number of tabs to the Sketcher palette and place any number of shapes within each such defined tab. You can also add or remove shapes from the predefined tabs.

The shape available in the Sketcher palette is defined by section file present in the sketcher shape directory. Use the 2d_palette_path configuration option to specify the path to the Sketcher shape directory. If you are working in a PDM environment, you can use a PDM location as the path to specify the Sketcher shape directory.

You must have adequate access rights to the PDM location to access the tabs and shapes.

The label of the tab in the Sketcher palette corresponds to the tab subdirectory that you define within the Sketcher shape directory.

If you do not set the 2d_palette_path configuration option, the current working directory is set as the Sketcher shape directory, and only one user-defined tab appears in the Sketcher palette. The label for this tab corresponds to the name of the working directory. The section files (files with the extension .sec or .dxf) within the working directory appear as the available shapes in the Sketcher palette.

If you change the contents of the Sketcher shape directory, for example, add or remove a tab subdirectory or shape, then you must reload the Sketcher palette to see these changes. To reload the Sketcher palette, close and reopen the Sketcher palette.

The Sketcher palette also has a preview pane. When you select a shape thumbnail in the sketcher palette, all the entities that will be imported into an active section appear in the preview pane. These entities can be Sketcher geometry, construction geometry, internal strong dimensions, and constraints.

Depending upon the value of the sket_import_geometry_line_style configuration option, the line style and color of the selected Sketcher shape is preserved when the shape is displayed in the preview pane or imported into the current sketch.

When you use a file from the Sketcher palette in the current sketch, the following entities of the section that defines the shape are imported:

• Strong constraints internal to the section (other than the vertical and horizontal constraints)

The locked state of the dimensions of the shape is retained when the shape is imported into an active section.